The present invention relates to a method and apparatus for detecting position of blank areas of an optical disc, and more particularly, to a method and apparatus for detecting position of blank areas of an optical disc in an optical disc drive.
Recordable Digital Versatile Disc (DVD) and re-writable DVD have various formats, such as DVD−R, DVD−RW, DVD+R, DVD+RW, and DVD-RAM etc. In general, when a recordable DVD drive writes data onto a recordable (or re-writable) DVD, it first identifies the end position of recorded data and then writes new data into a blank area of the optical disc starting from the end position in order to improve the usage efficiency of the optical disc.
The method used for determining the end position of the recorded data in the recordable (or re-writable) DVD of the related art determines the end position of recorded data using the data recorded in the programmable memory area (PMA) of the DVD.
However, while the recordable DVD drive writes data into the recordable (or re-writable) DVD, in some situations such as a tiny variation of the pick-up head, the recordable DVD drive is shocked and may result in the actual end position of recorded data differing from an end position recorded in the PMA.
As mentioned above, the method used for determining the end position of recorded data of the related art by using the end position recorded in the PMA of the recordable (or re-writable) DVD cannot accurately identify the actual end position of recorded data of the DVD. If the recordable DVD drive writes data onto the DVD starting at an incorrect end position, this may result in error of recorded data and thereby damage the existing data of the DVD.